Data centers typically have racks of computer equipment and media storage equipment interconnected hierarchically via network switches, routers, or both. In a utility computing environment, such as a data center, computers and media storage can be allocated on demand to applications according to the current application load. When an instance of an application/service starts up, it is allocated resources such that the network bandwidth between the network switches or routers is sufficient to support the projected demand for such an application. The purpose is to load balance the network load such that no single switch or router is overwhelmed by the network load. Currently, most network equipments in a typical data center are powered on all the time, even at times when the load in the data center is close to zero.